Vought ‘Flying Pancake’ enters Frontiers of Flight Museum

In the November Advocate, we wrote about outstanding seniors, including Jim Walston, who retired from Vought Aircraft Industries after working there his entire career.

Walston is a member of the Vought Aircraft Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit group that restores old planes and is composed of Vought retires like Walston. Their most recent project, the V-173 “Flying Pancake,” took almost nine years from start to finish. But it was delivered to the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field this week.

The Flying Pancake was an experimental plane, and only one was made. The Vought retirees had to experiment to get the plane’s yellow shell just right. It is made of canvas that is shellacked. And they had to engineer contraptions to hold the plane, which can’t be stepped on, in place to work on it.